A Million Stories

[ a million stories ]

After 19 years of blissful gay unity in Philadelphia, OutFest faces out-of-state competition: The National Equality March — which hopes to draw thousands to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., to demand equal rights for LGBT citizens — is taking place the exact same day. That means that Oct. 11, gay Philadelphians will face a difficult choice: Party here or protest there. And that has some OutFest organizers ticked off.

"They didn't even contact us," says Franny Price, executive director of Philly Pride, the group that organizes OutFest [see p. 40]. "We've been planning this since last November. They've only been planning this for a couple of months."

That's not entirely accurate. National Equality March spokesman Phil Siegel says the march has been in the works for eight months, and announced since June — plenty of time for Philly Pride to figure out that there might be a problem. And sure, this year's OutFest may be particularly important for Pennsylvania queers — both Democratic candidates for U.S. Senate, Arlen Specter and Joe Sestak, are supposed to attend, and Price wants to use the event to press gay-friendly politicians and activists to push Harrisburg for needed hate-crimes legislation — but Oct. 11 is always National Coming Out Day, a fairly obvious tie-in, so maybe they could have seen this coming.

At a public meeting a couple of weeks ago, the School District of Philadelphia released preliminary budget figures: They're staring at something like a $160 million shortfall, although district officials say they don't know the exact amount and, therefore, won't say yet what exactly it plans to cut.

But it will cut something, and that's got parents understandably nervous. Local gadabout extraordinaire Helen Gym, for instance, worries that the district will go after essential school services. The district isn't doing much to calm her fears, either.

For instance, the district recently released a document detailing its various expenses, including the ones that are not legally mandated (and therefore potentially on the chopping block). This list includes the nebulous "school budgets" line item, which at $740 million, equals 31 percent of the district's operational budget. But in that same list, the district includes four fairly specific expenses — the operational budgets for counselors, nurses, psychologists and English language learners. Together, these line items account for just 4 percent of the district's total budget. But that's still north of $107 million, and could go a long way toward stemming the district's seemingly endless tide of red ink.

Gym, and presumably anyone else who's paying attention, wants to know why those expenses — and not items like private contracts and the district's controversial payments to the Board of Revision of Taxes — were singled out.

District officials say that everyone needs to calm down. They weren't singling out anyone, says spokesman Fernando Gallard. Rather, they were just giving examples of how the budget is spent. "The bottom line," says Gallard, "is this is not a list of cuts."

Gym, however, thinks schools should be on guard: "There's a lot of indicators that schools need to be extremely watchful and ready to organize," says Gym.